Client: StarLion's KI Overhaul

[Grogyan]

The tabs represent the channels you're subscribed to.

I think I know what you're saying, so say if in the above pic, you belong to the Guild of Writers channel (Cause thats all the tabs represent is, channels) and chatting in say a Hood which is publically available, then I think you're suggesting that in both the Local and GoW tabs share the same conversation, even if someone else links in?

Is that right?

Slight problem with that if there is party member in another Age, like Ahnonay, who may not know "Jimmy Cricket" gets bombarded with messages from him with your hood buddies.

Though in saying that

In the Big KI you could have a check box that states "share group messaging", so that Nadnerb for instance who is in Ahnonay doesn't get bombarded by messages from Gow/hood buddies unless he wants to

(confusing)

[Marten]

No, that's not what I mean. I'm sorry I'm doing a poor job of explaining this.

What I mean is that there would be a special tab for the "active party". Not all members of the active party are necessarily in the same place - some might be in different Ages. But all of those members, when linking to any Age that is instanced, would (or could, depending on flexiblity of the design) land in the Age owned by the person who instantiated the party.

Perhaps the best way to think of a party is as a set of linked invites that can all be canceled at the same time...

For example, lets say there is a party of 3 people: John (Leader), Mary, and Stewart. All three are standing by the docks at the Ferry Terminal. Mary links back to Relto, and then to Ahnonay. Because she is a member of John's party, she would (or could) link to John's Ahnonay If John dissolves the party while Mary is in his Ahnonay, then when Mary leaves the Age, she will no longer be able to link back; dissolving the party throws away all of the implied invitations.

I understand this may sound confusing, but this is how other MMOs work.

[Grogyan]

That starts getting into the problem of instancing which is discussed in another topic.
It may work with other MM's, definitely none that i've played have followed that method (I havn't played WoW).

I suppose that you could do it that way, have a tab in the Nexus for "Party Links", which is very similar to "Private Links" which are invites that friends send you

[DarK]

Grogyan
There is problem with that layout , you run out of space to add tabs, remember that you could start up to as many chats as you want, however your layout limits this.
Not that I want to throw the item out completely, I would like to see the things like, Age, Neighbourhood and the Buddies channel, possibly a guild tab as well .

I think it’s a good idea for group global style chats, and that we use the floating box style shown in the OP for anything else, such as private PM’s etc

[Marten]

As the number of tabs expands, can the tabs get smaller and the text in them be abbreviated? That's how other systems I've seen do it.

[DarK]

Think about the screen space on a 800x600 screen, even the tabs already suggested might have to be abbreviated, the other issue is dynamically creating things in Uru.

I believe that you can't dynamically create SceneObjects efficiently in Plasma, so the only option would be to create all known options, then show and hide objects as required.

Personally I don’t want to be sat creating millions of different sized tabs for chat.

Again we don't know how many chats a player is going to be running at any one time, so we still hit the issue.

The other way to maybe do it would be to scroll the tabs at the top, but you are placing usability issues in front of the player, how do we go about indicating a new message on a tab that is currently not in view?

List manipulation is a lot quicker and dare I say it easier to manage.

Again I like the tab idea, but there is no easy way to effectively manage all chat through it without making the KI harder to use.

[realXCV]

Where is the button to capture a marker ?

[Christian Walther]

I like the party concept, it's very similar to one of my own ideas about KI improvements. I hadn't thought of a good name for it yet ("expedition list" or "shared buddy list" or "ad-hoc neighborhood" were terms that I considered), but "party" sounds good. One difference is that in my concept, the party is symmetric with respect to all members, there is no leader. The one who starts the party gets to name it, but once he invites others, they all have equal rights, can leave the party, can invite more members. Nothing special happens when the starter leaves the party (and leaving means losing all connection to it, e.g. he can't rejoin without being invited by a current member), the party only ceases to exist when the last member leaves it. Also, in my idea there was no concept of a "current party". You could be a member of as many parties as you like simultaneously. Some of them would end up more or less permanent, similar to neighborhoods, and some temporary, specific to a certain expedition.

I hadn't thought of linking link sharing to parties. That's a neat idea. Although it conflicts with my ideas of leaderlessness and outliving-the-starter, since there must be some choice of whose ages to use. Have to think about this.

And by the way, just to make that clear, parties are no substitute for multiple buddy lists, another often-requested feature. They serve different, independent needs. Parties are shared and symmetric (if I see someone in party X, they also see me in party X, and getting someone into a party requires their consent), buddy lists are private (when I add someone to my buddy list, they don't notice, and don't automatically have me on their buddy list).

[Grogyan]

The mock up I did, doesn't travel across the the whole width of the screen, so you can fit more tabs if you wish.

If you want more tabs that what be filled on screen then I suppose we would have to look at horizontal scroll buttons or scroll bar, working in tandem with the mouse wheel scroll

Looking much like this

[Grogyan]

Where is the button to capture a marker ?

I've moved it to the Lower right button in the Mini KI, its previously been unused, and seeing as the KI has more functions associated with GPS, I reckon this is a good spot to put it